A virtual personal assistant may consist of a computerized software program that helps a worker access, gather and analyze information to help the worker perform at a higher level. Virtual personal assistants for knowledge workers must have the ability to personalize, customize, and adapt to each specific user of the system. Knowledge workers operate in many different domains, each with its own jargon or terminology. In addition, each worker has his or her own version of that jargon. One solution may lie in the broad field of ontology. While ontologies apply in many different areas, they may provide a possible solution.
An ontology is a form of knowledge representation. Ontologies are frameworks for organizing information used in artificial intelligence, semantic web, systems engineering, software engineering, information architecture, information processing, virtual personal assistants, knowledge engineering and broadly in computer science as a form of representing knowledge. They typically consist of sets of concepts and relationships among those concepts for a particular domain. They are used to describe and understand the concepts of that domain. Artificial intelligence systems use ontologies to reason and extract knowledge.
Common components of an ontology include objects, instances, classes, attributes, relations, restrictions, rules, axioms and events. Objects are entities such as a person, a company, a name, etc. Instances are particular instances of an entity. Classes are collections of objects and entities. Attributes are properties and characteristics that an object or a class may have. Relations define how one class, object or entity relates to other classes, objects and entities. Restrictions define the constraints placed on classes, objects and entities. Rules define conditions and results such as those in if-then-else statements, logical inferences, etc. Axioms are logical assertions that define variables in the system, and events cause attributes, relations and axioms to change.